Steve Jackson Games - Site Navigation
Home General Info Follow Us Search Illuminator Store Forums What's New Other Games Ogre GURPS Munchkin Our Games: Home

Go Back   Steve Jackson Games Forums > Roleplaying > GURPS

Reply
 
Thread Tools Display Modes
Old 10-03-2019, 03:41 PM   #1
Phalanx
 
Join Date: Aug 2019
Default Greco-Roman atmosphere with TL 3 possible?

Hello!

Although the campaign setting has TL 3, it should not feel like the Middle Ages. Rather, it should have a Greco-Roman "feel". A series of kingdoms and republics that rally around a sea and fight against each other for influence. Is it possible to create such a mood even if the technology is TL 3 instead of TL 2? The players do not want to do without the stuff in TL 3.

English is not my native language. So sorry if I am partly confusing and make no sense.
Phalanx is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 10-03-2019, 03:48 PM   #2
AlexanderHowl
 
Join Date: Feb 2016
Default Re: Greco-Roman atmosphere with TL 3 possible?

Yes, it is possible, look at the maritime Republics of medieval Italy for an example. Genoa, Pisa, and Venice are all examples.
AlexanderHowl is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 10-03-2019, 03:56 PM   #3
ericthered
Hero of Democracy
 
ericthered's Avatar
 
Join Date: Mar 2012
Location: far from the ocean
Default Re: Greco-Roman atmosphere with TL 3 possible?

Its very possible. There are denizens of this forum (I am one such) who will tell you that Romans and late Greeks (like Alexander) should be considered early TL 3, and not to get hung up on northern europe not benefiting from that until hundreds of years later.

I'd say that the default fantasy setting feels more like the classical era (greece and rome) than medieval times. The difference is more cultural than technological. Here are some things to pay attention to:
  • Make The Sea important
  • Make Cities Prominent and use "Forts" instead of "Castles"
  • Don't use Titles like Duke or Knight. King is fine, but "Senator", "Elector", or "Patrician" is better.
  • Base Your upper class out of cities rather than out of their own personal provinces. Its also probably a little more thinly spread.
  • Emphasize infantry over cavalry
  • Get your religious settings right. The Classical period is more secular and polytheistic, while the middle ages tend to be religious and monotheistic
  • Food and clothing can go a long ways to establishing a context.
__________________
Be helpful, not pedantic

Worlds Beyond Earth -- my blog

Check out the PbP forum! If you don't see a game you'd like, ask me about making one!
ericthered is online now   Reply With Quote
Old 10-03-2019, 06:29 PM   #4
Fred Brackin
 
Join Date: Aug 2007
Default Re: Greco-Roman atmosphere with TL 3 possible?

Quote:
Originally Posted by ericthered View Post
I[*]Food and clothing can go a long ways to establishing a context.[/LIST]
Actually quite important. If you told your players that all the high-rankers looked like the Lords of the North from Game of Thrones that would be setting up your unwanted "medieval" feel.

So make it warmer so that it's not all black wool and fur. If it's warm enough most citizens can wear simple tunics and that would help your "Greco-Roman" feel quite a bit. If you want something a little fancier you could have "tunic-and-hose" parallelling the "doublet and hose" period of the late Middle ages and early Renaissance. Yes, knitting is late TL3.

You could go ahead and invent rapiers too for the well-to-do with the poorer classes still using the simpler short sword and nobody much using "medieval" broadswords i.e. the "arming sword" of the typical "knight"..

Also part of the "southerly" thing would be having everyone drink wine and not ale. No porridge for breakfast and spit-roasted beasts for supper. More likely a lot of seafood-based soups.

Set dressing could make a lot of little differences.
__________________
Fred Brackin
Fred Brackin is online now   Reply With Quote
Old 10-03-2019, 06:46 PM   #5
Agemegos
 
Agemegos's Avatar
 
Join Date: May 2005
Location: Oz
Default Re: Greco-Roman atmosphere with TL 3 possible?

Quote:
Originally Posted by Phalanx View Post
Although the campaign setting has TL 3, it should not feel like the Middle Ages. Rather, it should have a Greco-Roman "feel". A series of kingdoms and republics that rally around a sea and fight against each other for influence. Is it possible to create such a mood even if the technology is TL 3 instead of TL 2? The players do not want to do without the stuff in TL 3.
I think that the government of Italy by city-states during the Renaissance, and the huge multitude of sometimes tiny states in Germany under the nominal rule of the Holy Roman Empire until 1806 ought to reassure your players about the patchwork of little kingdoms, tyrannies, oligarchies, plutocratic republics, and democracies.

When I was going for a Classical-Greek feel to a fantasy setting of mine I:

• Made the terrain rough with lots of islands to play down the role of aristocratic cavalry.

• Made it respectable to become rich through commerce, so that city-based merchants and ship-owners could be serious political rivals to large land-owners of the countryside.

• Provided a polytheistic religion in which most people worshipped lots of different gods on different occasions and for different purposes, resulting in weak religious rivalry.

• Made the priesthood a state office rather than a religious one so that there would be no powerful Church, religious orders, or church corporations. That is, priests were mostly elderly politicians, and their role was understood to be the community's ambassador to a god or gods, not a divine emissary to Man.

• Emphasised service in the citizen militia as the base of military and political power.

• Made a big thing of gymnasiums, athletic training, athletic games, and communal bathing in public baths.

• Studied up on ancient Greek town planning and civic facilities to make my cities Greek and not English. (There is a great little book called How the Greeks Built Cities by R.E. Wycherley that I learned a lot from.)

• Copied ancient Greek customs regarding family structure and the layout of a house.

• Replaced all titles (Emperor, King, Duke, Count, Baron, nobleman …) with Greek ones or ones that sounded as though they might be Greek.

• Put everyone in Greek clothes.

I ended up with a setting into which I could put telescopes, clockwork orreries, mail, pattern-welded and case-hardened steel, windmills, land reclamation projects, milled coins, lanterns, porcelain, manual factories, arches, domes, fireworks, mechanical artillery etc. without seeming the least bit like Renaissance Flanders. I also sneaked in pseudo-Japanese and wuxia martial arts, wire-fu, lots of stuff.
__________________

Decay is inherent in all composite things.
Nod head. Get treat.

Last edited by Agemegos; 10-03-2019 at 07:07 PM.
Agemegos is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 10-03-2019, 07:56 PM   #6
Donny Brook
 
Donny Brook's Avatar
 
Join Date: Aug 2014
Location: Snoopy's basement
Default Re: Greco-Roman atmosphere with TL 3 possible?

You could do worse than exploring this article:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byzantine_Empire
Donny Brook is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 10-03-2019, 08:45 PM   #7
Pursuivant
 
Join Date: Apr 2005
Default Re: Greco-Roman atmosphere with TL 3 possible?

"A series of kingdoms and republics that rally around a sea and fight against each other for influence." is actually a good way to describe about any period in Mediterranean history except during the later Roman Empire.

Others have mentioned the Byzantine Empire and Renaissance Italy, but Medieval and Migration Era/"Dark Ages" Italian history is just as bloody. Likewise for Balkan, Spanish, or Levantine history of the same era (and probably Egypt and North Africa, but there's even less info available on those areas).

If you want good villains, or if the players want to play at empire-building, choose a period in Mediterranean history when some conquering empire was on the rise, like the various Germanic tribes in the 4th-7th centuries, the Arabs/Muslims in the 8-9th century, the Vikings in the 10th or 11th centuries, the Crusaders in the 12th-14th centuries (Crusaders from NW Europe weren't exactly friends to the Mediterranean peoples they encountered), or the Ottomans in the 15th to 17th centuries.

For vicious palace intrigue, take your pick of the Byzantine Empire, the Papal States at any time in Medieval or Renaissance history, or the Kingdom of Sicily in the 11th to 13th centuries after it was conquered by the Normans.

For merchant empire building, choose any historical Mediterranean city from Alexandria to Venice.

Finally, you can just do an "anachronistic Rome" setting as imagined by Medieval and Renaissance writers. Keep the material culture and "feel" of Ancient Greek and Roman culture, but allow gross anachronisms like jousting and longbows.
Pursuivant is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 10-03-2019, 09:08 PM   #8
Agemegos
 
Agemegos's Avatar
 
Join Date: May 2005
Location: Oz
Default Re: Greco-Roman atmosphere with TL 3 possible?

Quote:
Originally Posted by Pursuivant View Post
you can just do an "anachronistic Rome" setting as imagined by Medieval and Renaissance writers.
I understand that there is some literary material from Renaissance Italy in which the poet Virgil (Publius Vergilius Maro) appears as a great magician and prophet, but I'm not clear on how narrative and anachronistic it is. Avram Davidson wrote three fantasy novels in which the magician Vergil is the protagonist, and the setting is an Imperial Roman Mediterranean with Italian Renaissance cultural anachronisms. I've only read one of the series (The Phoenix and the Mirror (1969)), but it was excellent, and now that I know about the prequels I must track them down.
__________________

Decay is inherent in all composite things.
Nod head. Get treat.
Agemegos is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 10-03-2019, 10:53 PM   #9
Johnny1A.2
 
Join Date: Feb 2007
Default Re: Greco-Roman atmosphere with TL 3 possible?

Quote:
Originally Posted by ericthered View Post
Its very possible. There are denizens of this forum (I am one such) who will tell you that Romans and late Greeks (like Alexander) should be considered early TL 3, and not to get hung up on northern europe not benefiting from that until hundreds of years later.

I'd say that the default fantasy setting feels more like the classical era (greece and rome) than medieval times.
We casually speak of 'Greece and Rome', but this is misleading. It's true the Romans were more or less Hellenic, but the glory days of the Greek city-states like Athens and Sparta was centuries before the Empire, and there were very substantial differences over that time.

Quote:
The difference is more cultural than technological. Here are some things to pay attention to:
[LIST][*]Make The Sea important[*]Make Cities Prominent and use "Forts" instead of "Castles"[*]Don't use Titles like Duke or Knight. King is fine, but "Senator", "Elector", or "Patrician" is better.
Though the title 'duke' is actually derived from a Roman military/governmental rank.

The Roman Empire represented Classical Civilization in its 'mature' and 'old and tired' phases. One writers once observed that the Roman Empire was 'always a late afternoon kind of thing'. It was cosmopolitan to a degree inconceivable to Medieval Europe. Trade routes stretched from southern Britain to Mesopotamia and across North Africa. The elites, at least, had a much wider (in terms of world-size) perspective than the elites of Medieval Europe a few centuries later.

A TL3 fantasy culture based (loosely) on Rome in the Imperial Era would seem 'wider'. There would be more news, and more commerce, from much farther afield. There would be more foreigners in the realm all the time, traders, ambassadors, soldiers. Goods available, at least to the rich and middle classes, would be more diverse and somewhat more exotic.

(For that matter, the existence of a substantial middle class would itself be very un-Medieval.)

However...following the Roman model, the 'feel' should be different in a more subtle way. Most fantasy kingdoms based on Medieval Europe have an expansionist, growing feel to them. A society similar to Classical Rome would be big, powerful, rich, complex, subtle, sophisticated...and old and tired.

Imagine a society with big cities, wide-ranging trade, a complex and well-administered government...but no new tech, no new magic, in decades or centuries. Instead of wizards, good or evil, probing the edges of new magical studies, you get powerful wizards replete with old knowledge researched and perfected 250 years ago...but nobody's trying to expand it. Probably most people think everything there is to know is known.

Also...even a TL3 Roman Empire based fantasy realm would be hard to get excited about anything. Even things that should be taken seriously would tend to be mostly ignored, like increasing populations of barbarians over the borders. It might be hard for the ruler to get recruits for his armies, because patriotism, too, is muted and tired.

If you see what I'm saying. Rome was big, strong, rich, and old. Medieval Europe was relatively raw and crude and much smaller and poorer, but also young and vigorous and growing.
__________________
HMS Overflow-For conversations off topic here.
Johnny1A.2 is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 10-04-2019, 04:17 AM   #10
Michele
 
Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: Udine, Italy
Default Re: Greco-Roman atmosphere with TL 3 possible?

You have lots of very good answers and suggestions already, but I'd add: emphasis on city-state politics. Have them as a tangle of competing powers, including not just the old noble families but also the merchant upstarts. Have complex laws for regulating the competition through elections, favor networks, politically motivated trials etc.
__________________
Michele Armellini
GURPS Locations: St. George's Cathedral
Michele is offline   Reply With Quote
Reply

Thread Tools
Display Modes

Posting Rules
You may not post new threads
You may not post replies
You may not post attachments
You may not edit your posts

BB code is On
Fnords are Off
[IMG] code is Off
HTML code is Off

Forum Jump


All times are GMT -6. The time now is 10:39 AM.


Powered by vBulletin® Version 3.8.9
Copyright ©2000 - 2024, vBulletin Solutions, Inc.